Mornings
by Scribbler
Summary: [one shot] Kitty is making a real effort to celebrate her first year of marriage. Ray is still trying to figure out how it happened in the first place. Short and fluffy.


**Disclaimer: **Not at all mine.

**A/N: **For Shadow Diva, who requested this over on LiveJournal. Unashamedly WAFF-y. You have been warned.

**Continuity:** Post-end of series. Can be taken as existing in the same universe as my other fics, _Candy-Coloured Dreamcoat_ and _Very Nearly Almost Happily Ever After_, though you don't have to have read them to understand this one.

**Feedback: **Yes please

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_**Mornings**_

© Scribbler, August 2006.

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Ray likes mornings.

He's not a Morning Person. He's never been bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in his life, and if anyone ever accused him of being 'on top of the world' he'd ram their spleen down their throat. But he likes mornings - mainly because Kitty makes him drink that herbal tea shit every night, so a full bladder wakes him early. Once he's seen to business, he can slip back into bed and watch her sleeping until the alarm goes off and sends her bolt upright like Frankenstein's monster. Again, if anyone ever accused him of doing anything so mushy he'd electrocute their cornflakes, but as long as it stays relatively secret he's happy to say that he likes mornings.

Kitty always gets little frown lines while she sleeps, like she's working on yet another plan to save the planet. Those plans are never practical – how is him remembering to screw the cap back on the toothpaste going to stop world hunger? – but she looks so stern while she outlines them that he finds it's either nod or burst out laughing. She doesn't do solemn very well. The cute little moue spoils it, because it makes him want to kiss her and you shouldn't kiss people while they're chewing you out for ruining the economy of developing countries.

This morning, however, he awakens to a cold bed and a suspicious indentation where another body should lay.

Ray doesn't suffer from sleep-to-wakefulness fug. His time in the Morlock tunnels taught him to sharpen the moment he surfaced from sleep, so he's always battle-ready. You don't recover from habits like that. Sometimes he can still picture others, who couldn't perfect the habit, shooting up to stay awake. You were harder to catch if you never slept. Their haggard faces can still make him clench his fists and want to punch something, even though the Morlocks haven't lived in the sewers for a while now.

He sits up, feeling the depression to see if it's cold and sighing with relief when he hears movement downstairs. It wouldn't be the first time one of the X-Men was kidnapped while they slept. Or ran away, in Rogue's case. She's doing pretty well now. He never would've pictured her as a team leader, but life in the Bayou seems to agree with her. She looked a hell of a lot happier the last time he and Kitty saw her – when Kitty tried to convince her that Gambit's a heathen and Bayville isn't just a crappy one-horse town full of poison pens.

When he emerges from the bathroom it's to find Kitty struggling through the narrow doorway with a loaded tray in her hands.

"G'morning," he greets her, announcing his presence so she doesn't startle and drop the whole caboodle.

"Oh! Uh, good morning. Sleep well?"

He shrugs and cuts to the quick. "What's all that for?"

"It was _supposed_ to be a surprise for when you woke up," Kitty pouts and sighs with the same breath. "Only you've, like, totally messed it up now."

Ray shrugs again, but holds open the bedroom door so she can go in, put the tray on the mattress and crawl up next to it. She hasn't grown an inch since she was fifteen, and for a moment he's arrested by the sight of her delicate bone structure in the early morning sunshine pouring through their uncovered window. They couldn't afford curtains when they first moved into this apartment, and somehow never got around to putting any up, even though she drenched the rest of the place in floaty pastels.

"Well?" she almost-but-not-really demands.

"Well what?"

"Aren't you going to come and join me?"

He sinks down onto his side of the bed, raising an eyebrow. "Breakfast in bed?" Already, his stomach is turning over at the thought of her cooking.

He's had to unearth his own cookery skills since they got together, since to do otherwise is to court stomachache, emergency bathroom dashes and extensive dental bills. Roberto laughed when he found the 'kiss the cook' apron and Ainsley Harriot cookbook. That is, until Ray slipped him one of Kitty's meat-free lasagnes and hid the toilet roll. Extraordinarily, now whenever people agree come over for dinner they ask who's on kitchen duty before accepting.

"Uh-huh. Well, I wanted to do something, y'know, special." She peers suggestively up at him from beneath heavily mascara'd lashes. Apparently, she was up before there was natural light to apply her make-up by. Her expression morphs into one of uncertainty, and then displeasure at his bewilderment. "You _do_ remember what today is, right?"

Ray scratches the back of his head. "Um…"

"Ray. Please don't tell me you forgot."

"Forgot what?"

He can see she's counting to ten in her head. She's got her 'you have no idea how patient I'm being right now' face on. The last time he saw that, she was talking to Nick Fury about why it was imperative he send SHIELD Force out to find Wolverine, since the X-Men were simultaneously tracking Phoenix in Siberia and neutralising yet another 'undercover' experimentation centre in Yosemite, and 'Lance needs to get off his butt and do something other than a press conference for a change _anyway_'. He almost smiles at the memory. She can't do solemn, but she can radiate indignation until it's almost a smell in the room.

"Ray … I made pancakes. I cracked eggs – _chicken embryos _– and whisked them with cow juice just for you. I toasted, I scrambled, I smuggled pancake mix into the apartment so you wouldn't see, and I used that dumb mixer even though I can _never_ get the wall completely clean afterwards … and now you're telling me you didn't even remember what _day_ it is!"

Ray sighs. She falls into dramatics so easily; it's ridiculously effortless to rile her. Leaning backwards, he reaches behind him in a thoroughly gymnastic manoeuvre and retrieves something small and covered in brown paper from the bedside drawer. It crackles as he plunks it on the tray between them.

Kitty looks at it, and then up at him, questioning.

"Happy anniversary. Sorry it's shittily wrapped, but you know I'm crap at that sort of thing. I did try. I'm just hoping it really is the thought that counts."

She unwraps it like she's expecting it to explode, and then throws herself at him, phasing her lower half through the breakfast tray so she doesn't spill anything. _More's the pity, _a small part of his brain thinks – that which isn't concerned with rocking backwards and nearly falling off the edge of the bed under the force of the hug.

"You remembered!"

"Tch, _yeah_. You think I'm as scatterbrained as, oh, say, you are? Give me a little credit. But you should've seen your face."

"Idiot." Loosely, she slaps a fist against his shoulder, and then retreats out of the pancake tower to admire the necklace. It's a tiny pink marble-effect kitten on a silver chain. Kurt helped pick it out.

Ray used to wonder about those two, even during Kitty's on-again, off-again relationship with Lance, but cottoned on that they're just friends after Kitty fastened her lips to Ray's own in front of the entire student body when he denounced her invitation to the Sadie Hawkins Dance as a joke. Kurt vetted him as his best friend's boyfriend, but seemed relieved at her choice. He and Lance never really hit it off. He'd clammed up because Lance seemed to make her happy, but there was a lot of history there. And if he'd dropped one or two water balloons on Ray's face first thing in the morning and then used Kitty as a human shield … well, what were a few bruised kidneys between friends?

"You like it?"

"I love it, you big doofus." The little kitten catches the light as it dangles. "But you don't get your present until after you eat your breakfast."

Ray frowns. Kitty's gifts are notoriously fluffy, and even though she made him wear a salmon pink tux and top hat to their wedding, he's still only able to stomach so much frippery in his life. Really, it's a miracle he ever fell for her. Some people still haven't figured out how it happened.

Some days he's one of them.

Not today, however. Not when she's looking at him like that. She's tugged one strap of her nightdress off her shoulder, and leans forward a little, revealing just enough flesh to make his eyes widen. They don't have to be at the Institute for another few hours, he's suddenly reminded. Professor Xavier's in Brussels, Scott still hasn't recovered enough from Jean to come off sabbatical, and Wolverine … well, he'd probably still skewer Ray for being late, but today? It'd be totally worth it.

"I could find some brown paper to match yours, if you like. Or not."

Ray seizes the knife and fork and tries to cut into scrambled egg the consistency of Tipex. Weird food notwithstanding, he reflects, he does like mornings.

Oh yes he does.

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fin.

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End file.
